Quotes from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true,
only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.' ”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“No Utopia is Utopia for everyone”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I still haven't found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The secret to a good life,” he told me once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Airports and train stations are where you get to cry”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

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Popular quotes

“Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness

“We live in an age when there is no room for the impossible.”
― Anthony Horowitz, quote from Raven's Gate

“A life can be defined by its hardships or its blessings. It’s all a matter of how you look at it.”
― Penelope Ward, quote from Stepbrother Dearest

“The small Japanese immortal sat cross-legged, his two swords resting flat on the ground before him. He folded his hands in his lap, closed his eyes and breathing through his nose, forcing the chill night air deep into his chest. He held it for a count of five, then shaped his lips into an O and blew it out again, puncturing a tiny hole in the swirling fog before his face.
Even though he would never admit it to anyone, Niten loved this moment. He had no affection for what was to come, but this brief time, when all preparations for battle were made and there was nothing left to do but wait, when the world felt still, as if it was holding its breath, was special. This moment, when he was facing death, was when he felt completely, fully alive.
He’d still been called Miyamoto Musashi and had been a teenager when he’d first discovered the genuine beauty of the quiet moment before a fight. Every breath suddenly tasted like the finest food, every sound was distinct and divine, and even on the foulest battlefields, his eyes would be drawn to something simple and elegant: a flower, the shape of a branch, the curl of a cloud.
A hundred years ago, Aoife had given him a book as a birthday present. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she’d missed his birthday by a month, but he had treasured the book, the first edition of The Professor by Charlotte Bronte. It included a line he had never forgotten: In the midst of life we are in death. Years later, he’d heard Ghandi take the same words and shift them around to create something that resonated deeply within him: In the midst of death life persists.”
― Michael Scott, quote from The Enchantress

“We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Human Stain

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